


Louder Than Bombs (Complement Fic)

by SnitchesAndTalkers



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Bandom Big Bang 2018, Dogs - both dead and living, Established Relationship, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nuclear War, Smut, The End of the World, complement fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 19:45:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16793554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnitchesAndTalkers/pseuds/SnitchesAndTalkers
Summary: Take This to Your Grave drops in May 2003. The bombs drop a month later. Patrick's almost okay with it, out on the road and far from Chicago, a gang of Lost Boys searching for Neverland across the endless stretch of the Midwest. He has his friends, his van, his guitar. Most importantly, he has Pete, his first love and his second star to the right.How bad can things possibly get?





	Louder Than Bombs (Complement Fic)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Louder Than Bombs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16793341) by [Das_verlorene_Kind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Das_verlorene_Kind/pseuds/Das_verlorene_Kind). 



> Hello again! 
> 
> Some of you might be reading my Bandom Big Bang primary piece but, fun fact, I also made a complement piece to go with the utterly stunning artwork by [Das_verlorene_Kind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Das_verlorene_Kind/pseuds/Das_verlorene_Kind) which you can find [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16793341) and rebloggable [here](http://das-verlorene-kind.tumblr.com/)! Honestly, it's worth heading over to Tumblr and following her because she is _crazy_ talented. 
> 
> Anyway, this is very, very different to the kind of thing I usually write. At times, it may even seem a little bit hopeless. But, if you trust me (and really, how could you _not_?) then follow me through nuclear war and see if we make it out the other side...

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/155712566@N06/32190773318/in/album-72157676084673908/)

_It’s been a month since the bombs fell, give or take a few days. I never realized something as linear as **time** would become so hard to track. It’s easy, right? You just take the day that came before, add another one, every thirty or so you change the month. But, you know how when you graduate high school, you forget how to do long division? Or, like, whether it’s a verb or an adverb and why that’s supposed to be important? I guess it’s sort of like that. _

_I can figure out exactly how far we’re going to get on whatever gasoline we manage to find, though. I mean, that’s pretty sweet, right? One day, when everything’s back to normal, I’ve got a totally killer career waiting for me as one of those ice road truckers. I’m gonna get a sweet-ass show on The History Channel and it’s gonna be fucking **rad**. _

_I kind of can’t decide if I wish I’d been with mom or if I’m happier I was with Pete. Is that weird? Nothing feels real right now, like this is just another part of the tour. I totally miss cell phone service, not gonna lie._

“What, in the name of fuck, do you think you’re doing?”

Patrick has been asking the same question — well, a whole line of questions but mostly in the same sort of vein — since Pete snatched a can of black paint from a dumpster like some kind of Home Depot supervillain at the last truck stop. Right now, Patrick’s trying his best to break his way into a can of creamed corn using a screwdriver and a rock.

(He’d like a can opener but he’d also like — in no particular order — clean underwear, a bed and the world _not_ to have been torn to shit by nuclear war. Life's a bitch and whatever keeps Pete occupied and away from sharp implements is fine by him.)

“Our sigil,” says Pete, accompanied by the wet slap of bristles to metal. This is the sort of sound that, when associated with Pete Wentz, has no viable outcome other than terrible. Patrick has plotted charts and equations and fucking venn diagrams on the subject. He knows his shit. He looks up. “We need a way to identify ourselves.”

“Huh.” Joe doesn’t sound convinced. Watching Pete describe an arc of black gloss paint across the side of the van, Patrick understands entirely. “Which is?”

Pete gestures to his shirt. They’ve been digging them out of the merch box since the world found better things to think about than obtaining mediocre shirts from barely-there pop punk bands. “This.”

There’s a long moment of silence. A second of mourning for a whole three hours of harmony, about to be broken. Joe, hands in his pockets and lounging back against a tree, considers the broken heart streaked bright across Pete’s chest. He sucks in a breath, holds it. Patrick is fascinated, the rhythmic thump of rock to screwdriver stilling entirely. He’s been starved of cable TV, radio and regular cell phone service for a month. He’ll take whatever entertainment he can get.

“That,” says Joe, with the gravitas granted only to nineteen-year-old not-quite-men, “is the single gayest thing I’ve ever seen in my _life_. And I’ve seen you suck Patrick’s dick.”

“Well, that’s _super_ heterosexual of you.” God, but Pete has this _confidence_ , this unstoppable, tsunami force _arrogance_ that leaves him entirely unshaken by any kind of criticism. Patrick would trade his dead cell phone, the last pair of boxers in his duffel bag and maybe, like, _half_ the creamed corn he may or may not be able to liberate for even a fraction of Pete’s self-love. “Patrick likes it, don’t you?”

There’s an expectation crackling between the three of them, the obligation for him to stand by his man and give him two arms (and a paintbrush, and a can of ‘midnight oil’ paint) to cling to. Every teenager reaches a definitive moment as they segue into adulthood. Patrick suspects this may be his.

Listen, Patrick’s an okay boyfriend but a terrible liar and the truth is Patrick _hates_ it. “He’s right, dude. It’s totally fucking gay, and I’ve, like, _actually_ sucked dick, so...” he pauses and, because he’s not a total douchebag, he adds, with a shrug, “Sorry.”

“Oh,” says Pete, and he’s clutching that can of paint like a kid with a macaroni picture. This makes Patrick the asshole parent who just criticized his artistic form rather than pinning it to the refrigerator like a normal human being. “Yeah, I mean — I thought maybe it might be cool.”

It would probably be okay, no harm done but hurt feelings, until Joe grins big and points straight at Pete. “Ha! Fucking idiot! You’re such a—”

Society at large is doomed never to find out what, exactly, Joe thinks Pete is as the next words are robbed from him by a fist to the jaw. Patrick’s sure this is a loss to literature in general and Fall Out Boy specifically. They go down raging, kicking and punching and snarling threats wrapped in half-sense. Patrick takes a long, speculative look at the sky above them and wonders what he ever did to deserve even half of this shit.

Then Patrick sucks in a deep breath and dives in. Fuck it, there’s nothing else to do.

By the time Andy intervenes, crashing through undergrowth with his pants mostly up and his belt mostly buckled, they’re all on the ground. There are fists and feet and Patrick’s pretty sure Pete just managed to simultaneously brain him with the back of his skull and kick him in the balls in the same bright burst of copper-gold pain.

“Whoa! What the _fuck_? Break it up, c’mon!”

Joe, bleeding from more than one place, takes a final kick and collapses against the van. “He fucking started it.”

“What the hell? That’s _demonstrably untrue_ , you called my sigil gay! That’s fucking homophobic, dickweed, and I won’t stand for it!”

Patrick is struggling to work out if his dislike is currently greater for the best friend who punched him in the face or the boyfriend who kicked him in the testicles. If he ever imagined the end of the world — and he absolutely did fucking _not_ — he never would’ve guessed it would be quite like this.

Andy’s doing this ‘calm blue oceans’ deep breathing technique, clenching and unclenching his fists as he stares into the middle distance. He’s no doubt figuring out if they’re walking distance to Wisconsin and if abandoning them is worth the risk of being eaten by bears along the way.

“Guys,” he says eventually, flat and level, “please can we start behaving like adults? Pete, don’t paint the fucking van and Joe, don’t call his doodle gay.”

Because he’s an idiot even with a bloody nose, Joe interjects, “Even if it is?”

“Fuck you, man!” Patrick falls on Pete before he can launch himself at Joe. “We — it’s just a fucking sigil! Does it matter?”

Patrick would like, very much, to trade in this apocalypse for a different version. Something a little more Mad Max and a little less Three Stooges. The giggle bursts from him before he can stop it, laughter choking thick at the back of his throat until he’s leaning weakly against the side of the van, tears streaming down his face. The guys are staring at him like he’s lost it, gone insane, flipped his goddamn lid. They’re probably not wrong.

“Trick?” Pete makes it a question, draws it out.

And Patrick, he wheezes, “You’re fighting — fighting over, fucking, _home decor_. That’s — it’s the fucking _lamest_ — oh _God_. It’s the end of the goddamn _world_ and — and you’re, fuck, trading _punches_ over what basically amounts to a fucking _feature wall_ … Dude, you’re — you sound like my _mom_ …”

And it works. They melt, dissolve, collapse down like bubbles until they’re puddled by the back door of the van, trading laughter and good-natured punches to shoulders that could really do with a shower. Once they’re back in the van, Joe and Andy up front, Pete and Patrick sprawled in the back trading kisses like baseball cards, Pete breathes hot and sweaty into Patrick’s neck.

“It was a kick ass sigil, though. Am I right?”

It smells of socks down in the pile of sweat-soaked sleeping bags. Boy feet and gym kit and unwashed boxer shorts. That’s good though, familiar. Patrick laughs.

“I’m like, pretty much certain you’re not,” prickled with goosebumps and half-hard in his boxers, he hauls Pete closer, “and it’s a _signal_ , asshole. _Signal_ is Warriors, _sigil_ is the fucking Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Know your goddamn fandoms.”

It’s been a month since the bombs fell. So far, it seems fine.

*

_I think I’d sell my soul for a Hershey bar._

_I can’t say that out loud. It’s been, like, four days since we found something vegan. Andy’s living off of handfuls of whatever berries or fruit we find in abandoned yards but none of us know what the hell is poisonous and what isn’t. It’s not so bad now, I mean, an apple’s a fucking apple, right? I don’t know what he’s going to do when there’s nothing left._

_I’m pretty sure this is the longest I’ve been away from home. I wonder if Chicago is still standing. We pass other survivors sometimes, whole families of them loaded into cars and minivans but no one stops. We roll on by like tumbleweeds. Pete says that’s safer._

_Sometimes, I count the loose threads in the ceiling of the van because there’s nothing else to do. I think there’s 187. That’s the number I’ve gotten more than once, anyway. I wish we could’ve kept the instruments but everyone said it took up too much space, the weight cost us too much in gas. I miss music. I kept this busted up acoustic but it needs new strings. Maybe we’ll find some in the next town._

_I wish someone said the end of the world would be this boring. I’d have packed a couple of books._

In the backseat, Joe is singing.

“Nine-hundred-twenty-seven bottles of beer on the wall, nine-hundred-twenty-seven bottles of _beer_ , you take one down and pass it around, nine-hundred-twen—”

“Dude,” Pete snaps from the driver’s seat, eyes meeting Joe’s in the rear view mirror. “Swear to God, if you don’t shut the fuck up, you’re not gonna live long enough to see bottle nine-hundred-twenty.”

Andy sighs. “Guys...”

From the back of the van, Joe grins, a gesture that can only be accurately described as shit-eating. He reaches into his pocket, Pete’s eyes narrow and his knuckles shift to white against the steering wheel. Patrick’s apocalypse has not yet included a dead body. He wonders if this is the moment that changes.

“Hey,” says Joe, “got something for you.” With that he pulls his hand free, middle finger raised triumphantly. Pete shifts from pissed off to apoplectic. “Go fuck yourself, dipshit. _Nine-hundred-twenty-six bottles of beer on the wall, nine-hundred-twenty-six bottles of beer!”_

“Fuck _you_ , asshole!” Pete, apparently forgetting everything he learnt in driver’s ed and the subsequent ten years of driving experience, lets go of the wheel entirely, lunging back against the bench seat as Patrick snatches frantically at sun-scorched black plastic.

The van slews wildly as Pete swings a slap at the side of Joe’s face. Patrick takes a second between screams to congratulate himself on his ability to voice every curse word he’s ever heard (English _and_ Spanish) whilst steering the van with one hand and yanking Pete back into his seat with the other. This whole thing is working wonders for his ability to multitask.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Pete, what the fuck!” he demands, shoving hard into Pete’s shoulder. The van barely changes speed as Pete floors it, the engine roaring, wheezing, begging asthamtically for reprieve as they surge along another abandoned middle American high street.

From the back, he hears Andy say, “—like a fucking _child_.”

“ _Dog_!” screams Joe.

And, “ _Fuck_!” gasps Pete, assuming the elbow-snapping brace position against the steering wheel as his foot digs into the brake.

Patrick has barely resettled in his seat, hardly under control of the haring thrum of his heart before they’re thrown forward with unearthly violence, defying gravity as they smash to dashboards and head rests.

“Shit!” Pete gasps, before Patrick — before _anyone_ — can ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing. He’s staring, panicked, through the dust-smeared glass, eyes very wide and lower lip trembling. “Did I — did I fucking hit it?” Patrick stares at him, mouth moving with no sound. Presumably, it looks gorgeous. “Fucking _hell_ , Rick, did I fucking hit it or not?”

“I—” Patrick stammers, fingers trembling as he grips at the knees of his jeans. He doesn’t know, he didn’t see, but Pete seems poised on the edge of a panic attack. “I didn’t—”

No one moves, all Patrick can hear is the way his breath pulls in and out, arguing its way back and forth with his lungs. Academically, Patrick knows there can be no war without casualties. That somewhere beyond their green-soaked stretch of Midwestern ghost towns, there has to be a death toll measured in numbers he can’t even begin to comprehend. People, real people, actual humans he’s known and interacted with burnt up to scorched-shadow outlines in nuclear blast.

But he really, _really_ doesn’t want to see a dead dog.

Pete is staring out of the windshield, Joe whimpering quietly on the backseat. No one moves, because moving might be seen as volunteering to go peel someone’s once-loved pet from the front bumper.

Andy, ever the pragmatist, sighs deeply, “I guess I’ll go check.”

He circles the van, Patrick watches him through the windows, stooping to check under tyres and fenders. Pete is shaking, babbling nonsense about accidents and doing everything he could. Joe doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, pale and sweating.

“The good news is,” Andy tells them, leaning on the open passenger window, “we didn’t kill it. The bad news is I have literally _no_ clue where it’s gone. Maybe we should—”

Patrick is already out of the van, tumbling across the sidewalk with Joe treading on his heels as they whistle and make universally accepted kissy noises behind dumpsters and rotting garbage. Joe finds it in an alleyway, a trembling bundle of rib bones and dirty fur that could be any color at all under streaks of beige, gray, brown.

“Hey baby,” he whispers as Patrick crowds in on him, kneeling on the sidewalk; the dog eyes them warily. “Come on, don’t be afraid sweetie, come say hi…”

A tail thumps cautiously, a pitbull slithering on its belly across hot tarmac for ear scratches it hasn’t had in weeks.

“Can we keep it?” Patrick asks, as Joe submits to enthusiastic doggy kisses. Andy frowns. “A dog would be, like, _super_ great for protection, right?”

Andy has the look of a man trying to work out where the hell they’re going to find dog food. “I don’t think…”

“Her name is Lila,” Joe calls, her collar tag caught between his fingers. “C’mon man, she has a _name_.”

“Fuck you guys,” Andy says, the bridge of his nose pinched between his fingers. “I can’t say no if she has a fucking _name_. But we find somewhere to give her a bath. Now. She stinks worse than Joe.”

“Hey!”

“I think I saw a lake a couple miles back,” Pete offers helpfully, on his knees next to Joe as they fuss Lila’s ears and scratch her belly. Her back leg kicks furious approval when they find that magic spot between her ribs. “Who’s a good girl! You are! Yes you are!”

They reach the lake within an hour.

It’s not too big, barely a half mile across if Patrick were to give a conservative estimate. It’s thick with summertime algae but no one gives much of a shit, splashing through barely-cold water. The leaves have a flash of copper and gold about them. It’ll be fall soon. Patrick isn’t worrying about it.

Pete climbs on Joe’s shoulders, whooping like cowboys as they crash into the water. Lila bites at the ripples they create, filth sloughing away to reveal her, brindle and white, all ribs and knobble-sharp hip bones. Lying on his back and watching the summer sky scud with whipped marshmallow clouds, Patrick could almost forget why they’re here.

“Hey,” whispers Pete, glowing eyes and conspiratorial smile. “Wanna go fool around?”

They find a spot, hidden under the fall of a weeping willow, branches trailing through the water like fingertips. Joe and Andy know when to give them space, when they shouldn’t follow, Patrick’s grateful for that even if he doesn’t know how to say it. Right now though, mouth against the fluttering bass line of Pete’s pulse point, he doesn’t know how to say anything at all.

Pete’s hand is in his shorts, rough in all of the right places, stroking electricity into the base of his spine as his fingertips tease through the ticklish curl of his pubic hair. Pete’s shorts float on the surface next to them, his soft cock twitching under Patrick’s palm, the pearl-slick shine of his come lost somewhere in the lake water.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” Pete tells him, sucking bruises to Patrick’s lust-tender lower lip.

It’s not that Patrick necessarily _believes_ him, but the fucked-out rasp of his voice touches something low in his gut. Pete wraps his hand around Patrick’s swollen, lust-thick prick once more and strokes a symphony of orange-gold sensation through him. Patrick throws back his head and groans to the trees above them.

Toes curled into the caramel thickness of lakebed mud under their feet, Patrick rocks his hips into Pete’s hand and lets go. He comes, pulsing thick and tingling, into the water between them, crying out into the hot, damp skin of Pete’s throat. He tastes sweat, smells skin clinging with the earthy scent of the lake as he rakes his fingernails the length of Pete’s spine. The world is golden around them as he fucks the final throbbing ache of it into the grasp of the warm fist around him.

“This is nice,” Pete whispers when the tremors have eased, hands around Patrick’s waist and lips sweetsoft. “I missed you.”

“We literally haven’t spent a second apart in, like, two months,” Patrick points out, pushing his fingers through Pete’s hair. It’s getting longer, curling thicker, Patrick can almost wind his fingers into it now. “You follow me when I take a piss.”

“I just like looking at your dick,” Pete grins; Patrick laughs. “What? It’s a _nice_ dick, okay?”

Patrick pulls him in, kisses everything he doesn’t know how to say into the curve of Pete’s smile. He tastes the familiarity of home on his tongue, tests the way his teeth feel, the hard ridges of his palate. He kisses him desperate because this is the end of the world and all they have is one another. He kisses him because he knows what Pete means, even if doesn’t have the words to phrase it.

“I missed you too, asshole.”

*

_I don’t get where everyone’s gone._

_I mean, the bombs didn’t touch the rural areas, the small towns dotted like museum exhibits around the Midwest. They’re fine, still standing, houses, apartments, stores, fucking **Walmarts** , all abandoned. Maybe there was something on TV before it happened. Maybe they’re just scared of what the gangs might do to them. _

_We used to stop to help people if they needed it. Busted tires, overheated engines, that sort of thing. We don’t anymore. Pete says he’s watched enough Van Damme movies to know a trap when he sees one. The only thing we really stop for is to stock up supplies and sleep. Even then, we take turns. Pete and I sleep while Joe and Andy keep watch, then we switch. Pete still thinks this is a game but it doesn’t seem very fucking funny when Andy had to eat meat yesterday. Nothing fancy, just some rabbit Joe managed to catch. Poor dude threw up his insides. He says it’ll get easier._

_I wish it didn’t have to._

“This one?” says Patrick uncertainly, smudging the cuff of his hoodie against the dirt-caked windshield of the van. It makes no difference, the mess is outside and they keep forgetting to refill the washer jets. The store is huge, one of those urban megastores that scar the landscape, put all of the local businesses under and don’t pay a living wage. Not that any of that matters now. “It seems… kind of big. Isn’t it a little, you know, _dangerous_?”

They have a system, guarding exits, working back to back as they methodically pick the store clean of anything that might come in useful. This works well in mom-and-pop drugstores. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to translate to megalithic sanctuaries to unbridled capitalism with multiple ways in and out, cavernous aisles and untold opportunities for things to go wrong. 

Pete (ex-bassist, local idiot) shrugs. “I bet they’ve got a literal fuck-ton of shit we could use.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Patrick says slowly, because he’s speaking to someone whose ego outweighs his IQ by several light years. This is not to say that Pete isn’t smart — he _is_ — but rather that Pete believes himself to be both impervious to harm and constructed entirely of rubber and magic. “But, like, don’t you think _other_ people might have had the same idea? That they might be in there _right now_? With, you know, guns and knives and molotov cocktails? Meanwhile, _we’ve_ got a baseball bat and a super irrelevant song about the significance of certain days of the week.”

The grin curving the corners of Pete’s lips suggests he hopes so. “You scared?”

“Yes,” Patrick says simply, because he fucking _is_ , okay? He has been since Oklahoma City disappeared from the horizon in a blinding flash of light. “Will that stop you?”

“Nope.” Pete is already hopping out of the van.

It’s barely daylight, dawn smudging rose-gold fingers of light across the horizon. Patrick used to be awed by sunrise — mostly because he didn’t see many of them — now it’s just another night bleeding into another day where all they do is try to survive. There’s a magpie on an abandoned Chevy at the far side of parking lot; Patrick carefully avoids eye contact with it as Joe and Andy stir in the back.

Joe, barely conscious, slurs drunk on sleep. “The fuck is going on?”

“We’re getting supplies,” Pete informs him, pocketing the hunting knife he found in a house somewhere in Arkansas. He found it in the garage, came out gray and shaking, vomited into a potted plant in the kitchen and told the rest of them not to go in there. The car was out there, Patrick saw it, two dark, adult shapes in the front seats. He tells himself the tiny shapes in the back seat were just a trick of the light.

The back door of the store is caved in, ram raided by something — a truck probably — buckled and out of shape. They slip through the cracks, seep into the store like shadows, silent on rubber-soled sneakers. Pete takes his hand, squeezes softly and points in the direction he wants to go — through the warehouse, out into the store. Patrick nods, they all follow.

There is nothing, Patrick thinks, more terrifying than a store abandoned like a ghost story. Half-full shopping carts, goods loaded onto the conveyor belts, fucking _teddy bears_ abandoned and trampled. He picks one up, dusts it off and tucks it into his pocket. Maybe they’ll fasten it to the van like a mascot. Maybe he’ll give it to Lila.

Pete moves with precision, twisting through the aisles and counting them off on his fingers. He’s memorizing their way back, Patrick knows, counting shelves and steps and turns left and right to make the best, cleanest exit in case…

In case they need to get out fast.

They shove things into backpacks as they move; canned vegetables, crackers, the shelves are mostly picked clean but there’s enough to make it worthwhile. Patrick’s heart is a merry thrum beneath his ribs, sounding beats he could fit to a dozen different songs he’ll never get to write. Every movement makes his stomach cramp, his throat seize, a fluttering anxiety attack streaking his vision black as Andy stops, drops, rolls and dives under a shelf… Only to emerge victorious twelve seconds later clutching a — a fucking _crossbow_ from amongst the wreckage.

“Nice,” whispers Pete with the kind of smile Patrick stole from across stages at basement shows. Back when the smell of their sweat was a temporary inconvenience between motels and not because there’s no longer a functioning water system.

Patrick exhales for the first time. Then promptly sucks that breath right back in as, far off in the warehouse that stands between them and the van, something skitters, metal on concrete.

 _Terrified_ is the kind of word Patrick tossed around before the bombs. Scary movies, dark hallways, chasing shadows across play parks late at night convinced something was moving out in the tree line. That’s not terror.

Terror is knowing the next noise could be the last thing he hears, the last thing any of them hear, before gunshots and shouting and nothing. He looks to Pete, because he’s nineteen, he _always_ looks to Pete, and waits for the knocked-numb lack of sensation to let him move his feet.

There are voices now, louder than theirs, and loud people _always_ have nothing to fear. Patrick’s lungs are quick, hard, stuttering sore. Pete shoulders his backpack and hisses through his teeth. “Three to the left, five to the right, straight to the end of office supplies and out into the warehouse. Once they’re in the store, we run like hell and we do — not — look — back. Do you understand?” No one nods. “Guys, I said _do you fucking understand_?”

Patrick nods, but he doesn’t understand at all. Not really. They have a baseball bat, a hunting knife and a crossbow none of them know how to use. He thinks he might be going into shock. But now is not the time and the human body is, he’s sure, capable of great and heroic things when the situation calls for it. So, he shuffles along behind on numb feet and tries to pretend it’s not his fault — it’s _not_ his _fault_ — when his elbow catches on a half-trashed display of own-brand, knock-off crock pots and sends the whole fucking shooting match crashing to the tiles.

In a distant place, far beyond Patrick’s plane of reasoning, the voices grow closer, furious. Pete grabs his wrist and yanks him hard, tugs him through aisles he remembered to count and Patrick didn’t. Because Pete is a survivor and Patrick _isn’t_. He can’t see Joe or Andy but Pete is still muttering, over and over like a fucking mantra, _don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back._

They burst through the shutter grill and into weak morning sunlight. Even across the parking lot, Patrick can hear Lila howling, throwing up a furious love song for Joe across the asphalt. They’re no more than forty paces from the van, forty long strides until his lungs can give out and his heart can explode and they’re _safe_.

“Holy fuck,” Andy isn’t out of breath, barely sweating, as he swings in step with Patrick, grabbing his other wrist and hauling him along. God, he’s so out of shape. “Come on, _move_.”

If Patrick could breathe, he’d point out he’s trying.

They slam to the van as the shouting bursts into the open air behind them. Patrick doesn’t dare look for Joe because if he’s not with them, if he didn’t make it out, he’s not sure he’ll ever forgive himself. He’s already sick with guilt when the headiness of relief hits his gut, as Joe surges into the sweat-streaked edges of his peripheral vision and swings open the door of the van.

Andy leaps inside, hauls Patrick in with him, scrambles over the bench seat and guns the van into life. They’re in the parking lot now — the others — gaining ground as Patrick tries to remind his lungs how to draw breath.

“Get down,” Pete screams — _screams_ — visceral fear torn raw from his throat as he springs the final few feet, grabs Joe by the shoulders and shoves him, throws him, straight into the back of the van in the second a shot rings deadly through the post-dawn quiet.

Patrick opens his mouth to shout but nothing comes out, a vacuum of silence as shot peppers the side of the van and throws up pebbles from the parking lot. Ears ringing, he waits for everyone to laugh as they tear ass out of there.

Andy revs the engine.

Joe shoves up onto his elbows.

On the asphalt, Pete is very still.

Patrick — every part of him — ceases to be.

It’s Joe that does it, that scrambles back to the floor ducking shotgun pellets as another shot rings out, that grabs Pete under the arms and hauls him, limp and lifeless, into the van. That slams the door shut behind them and screams at Andy to get them the fuck out of there.

On a sleeping bag covered in unidentifiable stains, Pete bleeds. He whimpers a little but doesn’t move much. Not even when Patrick, shivering, hauls him into his lap and strokes back the tangled curls from his brow. Not when Andy — convinced they’re not being followed — swings into a clearing and climbs into the back.

(Pete’s face is a comic book strip of carnage, a special effects mask of Halloween makeup gore. The left side still entirely beautiful, the right torn up around his eye socket, wet tissue, blood, sweat matting into his hair. By the turn of the leaves and the chill in the air outside, Patrick could almost imagine this is another gimmick for another Halloween show.)

He moves when Andy tips bottled water over the mess where his right eye once was, though. Then he screams, thrashes, pulls tense and taut through every wire-hard muscle until he passes out, falls slack. Patrick holds his hand and sobs.

They don’t know much about first aid, don’t have any medical supplies beyond stolen antibiotics, antiseptic and basic dressings. Patrick only staggers away to vomit once as Andy scrapes out the shattered remnants of tissue from Pete’s eye socket, as he cleans it out with TCP and patches it with the only dressings they have. They let Pete rest with Patrick curled into him, Joe and Andy patrolling their borders with Lila as Patrick sings every song he knows to soothe Pete to sleep.

As the sun begins to sink low on the horizon, Pete stirs, stifles a cry and touches his face.

“Is — is it bad?” he asks quietly.

Pete has filmed music videos, starred in photo shoots, seen teenage girls buy posters that feature his face to tack on their bedroom walls. Pete is _pretty_ and knows it, stakes far too much of his worth in how beautiful he is. He’s still ethereal to Patrick.

Patrick, tears dried sticky on his cheeks, shifts onto his elbow and smiles shakily and reasons that honesty isn’t always the best policy. “No, babe. It’s — it’s fine. You’re gonna be _fine_.”

*

_We weren’t prepared for winter._

_We’re still not prepared for it._

“Do you think about home?” Pete asks softly, fingers stroking absently at the seam where his dressing meets his cheek. “Your bed? Your room? Your — your mom?”

Patrick tries not to think about anything beyond the basic premise of survival; of finding clean dressings and enough food to get them through another day. He moves Pete’s hand away, knots their fingers together and rests his nose in the crook of Pete’s neck.

“I don’t think about much,” he admits. Pete smells of sweat, of the faint, sickly scent of the wound healing slowly under his dressing. He says it still makes him panic when he wakes up, that his brain can’t figure out where the other eye has gone and swirls him seasick and dizzy with a misplaced sense of where his center of gravity _should_ be but isn’t.

They’re whispering, Joe and Andy already asleep, Lila twitching with doggy dreams of chasing sticks. Patrick pulls their sleeping bag around them tightly, tucks his hands under Pete’s shirt and strokes along the ridges of his hip bones. Beyond the window, he thinks it might be snowing.

Pete, he smiles. It’s foreign, a gesture he’s forgotten how to make. “Do you think we’ve missed Christmas?”

Patrick’s lips are chapped, cracked down until they’re bleeding. He keeps meaning to look for chapstick when they scavenge every drugstore they pass, but he’s always distracted by dressings, antibiotics, saline solution to keep Pete’s eye clean. He presses them to the flutter of Pete’s pulse and imagines they throb in time.

It’s not that Patrick hasn’t thought about the things they’ll never see again; the birthday parties, basement shows, sweat-soaked sheets on familiar twin beds in suburban neighborhoods he swore he’d outgrown. He’s mourned each one silently, consigning them to a box deep inside the sore, red depths of his chest and marked up with the words ‘dead and gone’. It aches, his heart heavy and raw when he realizes Pete didn’t do the same, that he’s clung on with childish hope to visions of sugar plums that dance in his head.

Carefully, he takes Pete’s face — scarred, bandaged, breathtakingly beautiful — and ghosts a kiss over lips as sore and dry as his own. “I would never let you miss Christmas,” he swears, “I promise you. Please try to get some sleep, babe, you’re exhausted.”

“Sing to me?” says Pete, tucking his bone-cold hand in the small of Patrick’s back. “Something sweet.”

For a moment, Patrick thinks. He tucks Pete’s head under his chin, lets his ear rest to the rumble of his chest as he breathes deep and begins to sing. His breath mists around them, catching on the frigid air and jewelling damp on his lips. Against his shirt, he feels the shape of Pete’s smile.

*

_When we talk about the things that we miss, it seems like it should be obvious. We should say shit like central heat, warm beds, shoes that don’t leak and, I don’t know, fucking **Denny’s** or some shit. But we don’t. We say things like Gilligan’s Island reruns and listening to the radio on rainy Sundays with nowhere else to go and nothing important to do. _

_Pete says he misses his dogs but never says he misses his eye. He can’t have either, so I’m not sure why he’s holding back._

_I miss my mom, my family, my music. We have this demo copy of Take This to Your Grave and sometimes we listen to it in the van. I miss a life we never got to have. I miss the songs we never got to write._

_Sometimes, I think the guys would rather we tossed the CD away, like it aches to know we’ll never make it. I can’t let them do that. If **we** don’t remember Fall Out Boy, who will?_

“What’re you doing?” Pete asks, curled under a sleeping bag in the corner of the van.

Joe is hauling on layers, boots and gloves more hole than fabric. Patrick has no idea how these things fall apart so quickly now that there’s nowhere to replace them. His Converse are kicked under the bench seat, the holes too big to patch or to keep out the cold. He can’t bring himself to toss them away, to lose another link to the life they’ll never get back.

Joe is barely visible between the peak of his hat and the scarf wrapped around his neck. “I’m painting your goddamn signal,” says the thing that was once Joe but is now nothing but wool and polyester and denim, “Give me your notebook.”

And this is how Patrick finds himself standing, shivering, just off of the I-71 in two feet of snow, watching Joe paint a sigil on the side of the van in grease-black paint. There’s snow in his shoes, down the back of his neck, frostbite creeping along the tips of his fingers in tattered gloves. Next to him, Pete shivers and adjusts the bandage that covers the raw, red hollow where his eye once was. Patrick takes his hand.

“What do you think?” Joe asks, three steps back and watching the way they consider it. A trapezoid topped with a crown, ‘FOB’ in the center. The paint drips, thick like blood, across the faded bod of the van.

Breath billowing like fog, Pete laughs; a startling, beautiful sound that Patrick hasn’t heard since a Walmart parking lot a season ago. Snorting, braying, donkeyish and ugly, Pete laughs until his good eye waters, until he wheezes, leaning weakly into the press of Patrick’s side. There’s every possibility his boyfriend has lost the tenuous hold on his sanity, his darkness bleeding over like black paint on white van. He squeezes Pete’s hand.

“It’s amazing,” says Pete, when he has enough breath to hold in his lungs rather than spitting it like frozen smoke across the clearing “It’s — thank you, dude. Seriously. We’re so fucking gnarly right now.”

Andy appears from the trees with something limp and furred clutched in his hand and Lila grinning at his heel. “Oh good, you ruined the van.”

Next to him, Joe whispers, “Be vewy, vewy quiet, he’s hunting wabbits.”

“If we manage to disturb them at this stage,” says Patrick loftily, “then there’s a distinct possibility this whole thing was biblical and one of us is Jesus.”

“Dibs!” calls Pete, ruffling Lila’s ears and tossing her the teddy bear they found on the floor of Walmart.

“Dipshit,” Patrick snaps. “You can’t dibs the son of God.”

“If anyone wants to avoid hypothermia for another night, I found a barn maybe a half mile down this road,” Andy guns the van, goldenglorious light spilling out across the snow. “Or I can leave you here to bond and bro hug and freeze to death. I will _totally_ eat you in the morning.”

“That’s what Trick said.”

Patrick will, just this once, not retaliate against this callout on his morals and virtue. Instead, he smacks Pete’s ass as they tumble into the van and slide their way along the treacherous stretch of iced up asphalt, skitter-sliding to a halt outside the solid bulk of a Midwestern barn. Inside, it’s still cold. Freezing, just as desperately devoid of warmth as anywhere outside and perilously chilled after the semi-warmth of the van. But they can light a fire in here, share body heat and firelight in a way that doesn’t burn out the van’s engine or blast through the gasoline it’s getting harder and harder to find.

When Pete is busy, when he’s moving and smiling and gathering anything they can burn like the pyromaniac Patrick remembers (the one that talked about introducing pyrotechnics into basement shows like he was a visionary for having thought of it first, and not a dumbass for forgetting about fire codes), he can almost pretend Pete’s okay. Yes, Patrick should stop him from pouring accelerant onto a pile of dry twigs in the one place Andy figured out the fire couldn’t spread and leave them all as burnt up as the people they left behind. And _yes_ , Patrick shold absolutely say ‘I told you so’ when Pete nearly loses three fingers and an eyebrow in the resultant fireball.

But Pete looks _happy_ , so Patrick stays silent on that matter at least. He keeps talking quietly to Andy as they prepare the meat for cooking, the skins set aside for later. Andy might have turned his back on veganism, but he won’t allow a thing to go to waste. The fire is warm and Patrick is tired, his eyes begging to slip closed as his head nods slowly on his shoulders.

“Shit!” Pete screams from somewhere in the bowels of the barn. “Someone help me!”

And Patrick’s heart stops. His lungs, his guts and the fire of neurons across the gray matter that molds him into what he is, all shudder to a halt, less like a decision and more like a train crash. Because Pete is screaming in the same way Pete screamed in the back of the van. It has that note, that ringing rawness of fear that takes the skin from the edge of Patrick’s throat, that leaves him a throbbing, unending nerve. Like he’ll die suspended in Pete’s agony, caught up in amber or tar or carbonite, the specifics fail to mean anything because Pete. Pete is screaming.

His legs feel soft — overcooked noodles — barely straightening at the knee as he staggers into, _through_ , Andy and, by extension, nearly plunges headfirst into the fire. The only thing that saves him is a fist in the back of his flannel, someone hauling him upright as his lips, frozen numb and barely moving, whisper, grate, silent scream _Pete, Pete, PetePetePete._

They follow the noise, though Patrick has no idea _how_ , only knows the way each step jars up through his jaw, how it seems to take forever to move one foot in front of the other but no time at all until they find him, huddled sobbing, over a pile of cold, dead fur.

Patrick thinks it’s Lila, some desperately distorted mirror image of her because she’s somehow lying dead on the floor of this barn and simultaneously frowning down at herself over Pete’s shoulder. Patrick hasn’t seen a lot of dogs since this happened, it’s easy to get them confused. But since Lila is breathing and whining and scraping her paws along Pete’s back, then this poor thing, this wretched pile of bones and little more, has no place making Pete scream like this.

Then he sees them.

Three tinier piles of fur and bones, eyes not yet fully open, pink paws scrabbling uselessly against a dead mother, crying for milk they won’t get. Two brindle, one white, with button noses and tails like washed out string. Pete misses his dogs. Pete misses _this_ dog, even though he didn’t know her.

“Pete,” says Patrick, when his lungs remember how to work, when his lips regain sensation and push puffed, cold words into the air between them. “I — I’m sorry, man. This — it really sucks, but—”

“We have to help them,” Pete insists, because _of course_ he does, he has to help everything and everyone. “I — look, we can take them, we can _feed_ them and we — a dog is protection, right? Four dogs are like — we’ll be the four dogmen of the apocalypse.”

Patrick crouches, pushes he thick, tangled mess of Pete’s curls back from his face. “Except we’ll all be famine, because those are three extra mouths to feed, babe. I know it’s awful but we can’t do this.”

“I can’t leave them,” says Pete desperately. “I _can’t_. We have some meat, I can, like, chew it up for them or something. Look, their eyes are almost open, they can totally manage solid food. It’s better than, better than...”

He doesn’t say it and Patrick doesn’t make him.

“You can make them comfortable,” Andy murmurs softly, gathering one against his chest and heading back towards the fire. “But they probably won’t last the night.”

They sleep around the fire, Pete huddled close to the pups, Patrick huddled close to Pete. Morning comes, as it always does, weak winter light breaking through broken beams above them. Back sore, Patrick blinks into the sound of Pete’s sobs bitten into his knuckles. There are two piles of fur lying still, tucked back to the protective embrace of their mother’s belly by Joe’s gentle hands.

But one is still moving, the white one, still wagging his tail, still blinking around the almost-heart-shaped patch of brindle over his right eye.

Pete names him Hemingway.

*

_I think spring is coming._

_The snow is melting and that’s got to be a good sign. It’s still cold as balls, still takes your breath away if you get up to piss during the night, but there’s the possibility that we might actually make it through winter._

_But, like, then what? We trail our asses around the Midwest for **another** nine months until it happens again? I don’t think I can do this again. I can’t. I’m trying so hard to hold it all together and for what — for Pete to hand his food to that goddamn **dog** like he’s got the weight to lose. _

_Yeah, we made it through the worst of the winter. But what the fuck will we do next time?_

Pete is anxious, Patrick can tell. The problem is that any emotion felt by Pete eventually passes around to everyone else. It starts with Joe, moves quickly into the hollow of Patrick’s chest. Andy is holding up so far, but he always does.

He’ll join them, given the inevitability of time.

“Where are we going?” Pete asks from behind the wheel. Between them, all paws and ears, sits Hemingway. Patrick has yet to see a more piss-poor guard dog dressed in bulldog’s clothing.

“Cosmically?” Joe asks laconically. “Or specifically?”

Andy is dressing the cut that bisects Joe’s left temple; a passing glance of a wound received from the snap back of a pine branch as he hunted in the woods. It’s not deep, but no doubt it’ll scar without stitches. Up front, Patrick slides Take This To Your Grave into the CD player and flicks to Reinventing the Wheel. Sometimes, it feels good to pretend that everything is normal.

Beyond the window, the landscape rolls away to meet the oatmeal sky; grey and lumpen and fat with the threat of more snow fall. The weather doesn’t mean it anymore, though, doesn’t attack them like it wants them to hurt. The cornfields have died, buried under white for too long, strips of brown emerging as it melts back, shattered ribs exposing rotten flesh. Pete adjusts his eye patch — the one Patrick made him, their stupid signal in sharpie right where his eye should be — and turns in the driver’s seat.

“I want to go back to Chicago.”

Patrick’s heart leaps, shudders, stops in his chest. They haven’t said that word out loud since this happened, since Patrick’s vision turned white as he watched the world go insane. Chicago is not a place they talk about and yet, now Pete has said it, Patrick feels his blood turn to yearning, the visceral pull in the deep, red guts of him to see the Sears Tower rises on the horizon, even if it’s broken and ruined.

He wants to drive out to the suburbs, to rake through the wreckage of Glenview and Wilmette and see if anyone is left behind. There’s the possibility that Chicago wasn’t hit too badly, the bad-bet, outside chance that his hometown is still standing. That he can see his _mom_.

His words are inelegant; a tangled rush that trips past his lips as he nods, broken, ragged. “I want that. I want that so much. We — we can’t be _too_ far away,” and he’s leaning against the windshield trying to figure out a town name, a place marker, _anything_ , “this is, uh, it’s _Wentzville_? What the hell, man? I — I’m pretty sure I saw signs to St Louis. We’re — we’re _not far_.”

“Patrick,” Andy interrupts him softly, the van silent as he pauses, nothing but his own voice on the speakers and his own breathing hard and sharp in his ears. “We can’t do that. The cities are — they’re all gone. Chicago’s a big one, dude. They — it won’t be there any more.”

“I want to go home,” Pete snaps sullenly.

Andy sighs, clearly close to the end of his patience, so _tired_ of this shitty new world that none of them asked for. “Tough shit, cupcake. Chicago is gone, put on your big girl panties and fucking _deal_ with it.”

“But,” says Patrick, prepared to defend his case, to put forward reasoned arguments and counter-offers, to negotiate in the ways the world leaders decided not to.

Instead Pete, a reckless, dictatorship _explosion_ of a human being, slams his combat boot into the center console. “Fuck _you_!”

The CD skips, falters, picks up the stuttering shake of Patrick’s lungs and then falls silent. The display is cracked, broken, the lights dimming sadly. In this blistering second of wide-eyed stillness, everything that Patrick was when he climbed into this godforsaken van almost a year ago, when he waved goodbye to his mom and promised he’d call but then, like an idiot, _didn’t_ , it all dies. It ends with the dimming light of the broken stereo and the CD lodged inside that he knows he’ll never hear again. There are no words available to Patrick that will adequately convey what Pete has just taken from him; the last gossamer glimmer of the youth, of the band, of the _life_ he was supposed to lead before someone with more power than brain cells stole it.

Silently, Patrick opens the van door. He jumps down into the slush and filth and grey-bone grossness that splashes over his boots and seeps into his jeans. Then he walks and refuses to look back, the door left open, Pete shouting after him. Patrick hopes he screams until his lungs break, until he gives up and folds to nothing like the fucking CD. It was hard enough to abandon his guitar. He doesn’t need this, too.

Wentzville is exactly like every other Midwestern town they’ve ever stopped in; there’s an abandoned titty bar, a Dick’s sporting goods stripped of everything useful (by which Patrick means everything _deadly_ ), a Denny’s out on the fringes. He twists right, left, follows alleyways and do not turn signs and doesn’t think, doesn’t think, doesn’t _think_.

There’s a fire escape ladder up ahead. The kind that looks like it would’ve defied building regulations even before the world ended; missing rungs, held together with rust and positive mental attitude rather than nuts and bolts. He climbs it anyway, gloriously reckless in his fury. He hasn’t been up high in too long, hasn’t felt the rush of skyscraper wind and lake air through his hair since Chicago was more than a distant memory. The unit is maybe ten stories high; it’s not much, but he needs to see the town laid out beneath him. He needs to look to the north and imagine he can see home on the horizon.

It groans under his weight, creaks threats under the treads of his boots as he climbs, swinging up the stairs as the town grows smaller below him. He is removed, six steps to Patrick Stump, watching the way the snow melts back from the asphalt and the buildings rot around him. He makes the last step easily, onto the roof space with it’s hulking air conditioning units and water tanks, far above the streets below and the distant ring of Andy and Joe calling his name. He’s high enough that he could fly if he tries, he’s sure of it, he could step out into air and nothing and soar all the way to Lake Michigan on pockets and currents and migration paths.

He doesn’t turn when he hears someone step onto the roof behind him. He sneers his distaste at the building beside them, implores for relief from the endless monotony of the same four bodies packed into a stinking van with a roll of his eyes. “Go away.”

Pete, of course, does no such thing, swinging onto the roof ledge beside him. They sit, side by side, feet dangling into nothing. He sighs, looks at Patrick’s hand then thinks better, crosses his arms like he needs to force himself not to touch.

“I’m sorry, okay?” he sighs, watching the endless horizon with endless eyes.

Patrick laughs, brittle bones and no mirth. “No, you’re not. You don’t get it.”

“Don’t I?” Pete’s heels drum against the brickwork; for a moment Patrick thinks he might jump, plummet down onto concrete and shatter away to dust.

“I want to go home,” Patrick mutters into the collar of his jacket, he sewed his Converse tag there, the matching one tacked to the collar of Pete’s, “I didn’t ask for this.”

“None of us did,” Pete observes, gold in the setting sun, breathtakingly beautiful. Patrick takes his hand against any better judgement. “We’ll go back to Chicago, I swear it. And I’ll raid every record store until I find you another copy. Some asshole had to be dumb enough to think we’d be the next best thing.”

“I’m that asshole,” Patrick shrugs sadly. It gets cold when the sun goes down, their breath is heavy-thick with fog already. “Okay, tantrum over, let’s get back.”

Patrick isn’t expecting it. He’s thinking of nothing at all as they descend the fire escape together, Pete two steps ahead. The world slides away from beneath him as one of those rust-and-good-luck bolts shears away under his boot, as he slams, scrapes, screams his way to the ground.

On the floor, sat on his ass on damp asphalt, he thinks about laughing at his own ridiculousness. Until he realizes Pete’s eyes are filled with horror and Patrick’s mouth is filled with blood. He gags, the coppery thickness of it clagging against his tongue and the back of his throat, his lips a sudden headrush of drunken agony. He touches, feels the loose, torn edge of it and pulls his hands away wet with gore. He tries to speak, fingers washed red, but chokes instead.

He thinks he passes out.

When he blinks, the steel gray sky has given way to the off-white headliner of the van, the nicotine stains bleached into the fabric and the dirty denim tang of Pete’s jeans under his head.

“Don’t move,” Andy soothes him. Patrick nods, woozy, and resolves to do just that until someone — some _asshole_ — upends a bottle of napalm over his face.

Like any sensible person subject to physical attack, he screams himself bloody and throws a fist at Andy’s face. Or he tries, washed-weak with shock and shaking sore with adrenaline he’s pinned, Pete’s arms looped through his as he murmurs to him gently. “Shh, shh. I know, it stings like a fucking _bitch_ , am I right?” Patrick resolves, through blistering, crystal sharp agony, to never tut in frustration when Pete winces his way through dressing changes. “It’s alright, babe. He’s just cleaning you up. This is — you’re gonna be fine, okay? Just relax, deep breaths, come on.”

He soon learns that there’s a difference between unbearable pain and agony so exquisite he would sooner tear off his own face, would sooner _die_ , than suffer through another shuddering heart beat of it. He discovers this as Joe takes his legs, as they hold him down and, with Andy grim-faced and determined, use the suture kit they picked up at a medical center for the first time. Every stitch is torture, the pull through of surgical thread slicing through him until he discovers he no longer possesses the ability to scream. He collapses, sobbing, against the van and waits for death or relief. Whichever comes first.

“I’m sorry,” Pete whispers — he means it, Patrick can tell — smoothing a hand through the tangled mess of Patrick’s hair. “I’m so, so sorry.”

They lie together afterwards, Patrick’s head pillowed on Pete’s chest as he counts the way his pulse beats in his lip. Under the scratch of denim and cotton, he swears he can feel the bone-sharp edge of each rib, the arch of his sternum, his hip bones breaking hard against his skin. Pete is skeletal and Patrick is furious.

“You’re too thin,” he accuses Pete, shoving him sharply. It makes his mouth hurt, makes the agony bleed up into his temples as Pete looks at him slowly. “Look at you, you dumb son of a bitch. You gonna keep tossing your food to that — that fucking _mutt_? Huh? You gonna just waste away and fucking _die_ rather than — than—”

“Fuck you,” Pete snaps. He’s too small, all bones and angles dressed in dirt and three month old sweat. “Maybe next time you’ll look where you’re fucking going instead of falling over your own fucking _ass_! _Oh hey, I’m Patrick, and I’m a dumb piece of shit_!”

“ _Quiet_!” Andy roars from the front. Somewhere between bombs and bad feeling, a silent but unanimous election was held, voted and instated; that Andrew Hurley is not to be fucked with when he’s furious. Patrick touches his lip, feels the raw, ragged edges damp with plasma under his fingers. “Can we just fucking _knock this shit off_ for five _fucking_ seconds? Pete, leave the kid alone and Patrick? I — you’re right, dude, Pete needs to eat more. Tomorrow, we split our food so Hemmy gets some. We all eat a little less, Pete eats a little more—”

“I can feed him _myself_ —”

“Shut up,” Andy snaps, throwing his sleeping bag to the side. “Joe? Come on, we’re going on patrol. You two? Kiss and make up.”

“But it’s the middle of the night.”

“ _Now_ , Joe.”

The door slams behind them, the van ringing with resentful silence. Finally, Pete digs his toes into the soft flesh above Patrick’s hip, his eyes hesitantly hopeful as he tilts his head. “So,” he begins; Patrick swears he won’t forgive him, no matter what he says. “You want me to ride you or not?”

Patrick would like to state for the record that nodding so fast his neck aches does _not_ indicate that Pete is off the hook.

But he’s definitely on his way there.

*

_I think I’m getting sick. That back of the throat ache is there. Honestly? This scares me more than anything. Bodies heal but viruses aren’t that straightforward._

When Patrick was ten years old, he got the flu. Two weeks of bed rest and aching bones, of fever sweats and delirious waking nightmares. His mom sustained him on a diet of Cartoon Network, Gatorade and motherly affection until he was strong enough to keep down chicken soup and crackers. He doesn’t remember it in too much detail, it’s lost and hazy, similar to the way he half-recalls the shape of his dad’s sad smile the day he loaded up his packing boxes into the back of the car be bought from Jimmy’s dad three streets over.

Patrick wants his mom so badly his body vibrates with it, down to marrow, down the roots and dark folds of him that twist together into a being of heat and pain and delirious imaginings. He’s not sure where he is; there are beams over his head instead of the roof of the van. It’s dim, dark, the light hurts his eyes. He thinks he heard Andy saying something about it being contagious.

It’s almost funny. He thought he’d die in a knife fight or a second-wave bomb blast, or of hunger, malnourishment, fucking _boredom._

It seems he might die of the flu. _Patrick Martin Stumph — Survived Nuclear War, Nailed by Flu Season_. He sort of hoped for a more kick-ass eulogy.

Someone — Pete — touches his brow, wipes away sweat and dirt and brings tepid water to his lips. He drinks because he’s lost the will to argue, not because he enjoys the way it feels like razor blades slicing his throat from the inside.

“I—” he croaks, stops, blinks until Pete comes into focus, “I think m’ dying. Love you.”

“Dude,” says Pete. “Shut up. You’re just cold. No one ever died from cold.”

Patrick wants to point out that Scott of the Antarctic might beg to differ. He _wants_ to point out that, after famine and, like, possibly war, _cold_ is pretty much the biggest killer of the human race on a global scale since everyone grew legs and started walking around wrapped in animal fur. But that’s for another time, when his skull doesn’t simultaneously weigh four-hundred pounds _and_ feel like it’s stuffed with cotton balls. He grunts instead.

“The fire’s dying,”Joe mutters from somewhere in the room. Patrick notes that no one adds that _he’s_ dying, too. “We need more kindling.”

“Nothing’s dry enough,” Andy this time, concerned. It was raining, Patrick recalls, before he got sick, a constant patter of water against the roof of the van that leaks in through the rotten window seals. There’s something warm and soft sticking to his side. He realizes, dim and distant, that it’s Hemingway. “Well, apart from…”

Thoughts collude; shrapnel pushing from the putrid dark depths of a wound. He knows what Andy means. Patrick’s guitar. The final link to music, to the life he lost to nuclear war. Patrick struggles to sit before remembering he can’t and landing back on the ground with a thud. “No!”

“I know you’re attached to it,” Andy is talking to him like he’s an idiot, a kid to be calmed. Patrick has no desire to calmed. “But it’s the only thing—”

“Fuck you!”

Patrick is panicked, his lungs too big for his chest and his chest too tight for his heart. Beneath the scars, the dust and the sweat, under the barely held-together veneer that he is, in any recordable way, _dealing_ with everything that’s happened in the past few months, Patrick is a terrified teenager. His guitar — no strings, half-worn out neck, tuning pegs held on with strong prayer — is less an instrument and more the symbolism of a ‘maybe’ in a distant future. If Patrick keeps the guitar safe, then, perhaps, things will be okay. He shakes his head, turns dizzy with the vehemence of it.

“Patrick,” Pete whispers, soft as spun sugar, crouched on his heels at Patrick’s side. “Babe, we _need_ to keep you warm.”

“No,” he says again, stubborn. If he repeats it, over and over, the scratched scuff of a needle on a groove-worn record, maybe someone will listen. “No.”

His throat aches; sickness fighting with the thick-wet film of tears. Pete sighs. “We don’t have a choice. I wish we did, but we don’t.”

“No.”

“For fuck’s sake, do you want to fucking _die_ out here? You want me to haul around a fucking broken acoustic because you have some idiotic notion that you can fix the damn thing?” Patrick’s heart hurts with every word, his eyes stinging and his head throbbing dull at the base of his skull. “You know what I’ll do if that happens? I’ll throw it in the nearest lake, I’ll watch it sink and it’ll be gone. Just like you. Get the guitar, he’s a fucking idiot.”

Patrick is not an idiot but he lacks the sensibility to argue his case.

In truth, Patrick is too exhausted, too jaded, too washed-raw and nerve-shattered to do anything more. He closes his eyes and refuses to meet Pete’s, even when he hears the splinter of wood against concrete.

“I’m sorry,” Pete whispers. They seem to say that a lot to one another. “I really am.”

Pete curls around him as the fire roars back to life, hauls him close and shares body heat. Between Hemmy, the fire and fever-sweat exhaustion, Patrick sleeps.

For once, he doesn’t dream.

*

_You tell yourself that homesickness is little kid stuff. I used to get homesick at summer camp or, like, when my mom used to send me off to visit my dad. I’m almost twenty, I didn’t think it was something I would feel now. When I got into the van last year, all I could think about was music, about the band and the contract. Coming home didn’t matter because what the fuck was in Glenview anyway?_

_I guess, at least then, there **was** a Glenview. Who knows what we’ll find now? We’ve seen enough cars heading away from the cities, seen enough bombed out suburbs to know Chicago won’t be any different. I think I need to see it, anyway. Maybe they only hit the center of the city. I remember reading someplace that the chance of survival is fifty-percent if you’re five miles away. Glenview is more than five miles from the center. _

_I have to believe there’s a hope for my family. Or else, I have to **see** that there’s not._

They don’t sit down and consciously make the collective decision to head back to Chicago. It comes about more like magnetism, the polarity of it, the need to dig their fingers into the hot stickiness of the open wound, pulling them in ever-decreasing circles on a sharp-relief map of Illinois.

They come in from the south, chasing surface roads along the banks of the Illinois River. The freeways, highways, interstates, none of it is passable; a collection of cars like hot wheels toys lining the endless ribbon of graying asphalt, both sides of the center marker all pointing south, all herding their way out of Chicago. They didn’t make it, none of them, and the world is starting to reclaim them as time goes on; plants and birds and animals making home in hollowed out engine bays and sagging upholstery.

No one speaks, they don’t need to. It’s there in the way Pete’s knee bounces against Patrick’s, the way Joe bites endless at the fraying skin around his thumbnail, the way Andy squints through the dust-caked windshield and worries at his lip. Patrick sits still, revels in the silence of it, a moment of respect for the city they’ll never know again.

They swing up to high ground and Andy stops the van. “I think we should walk,” he says and they nod, following in silence. They crest the embankment together, Pete’s hand laced with Patrick’s, Andy’s hand on his shoulder.

It takes him by surprise, although it shouldn’t, the way the skyline rears up like broken teeth against a steel-gray sky. Patrick saw the footage from the fifties; he was a cold war kid in the eighties, subject to public service announcements and platitudical pronouncements of duck and cover. He’s seen the way the buildings burnt up like kindling, the nuclear wind carrying them off to dust seconds later.

But he’s never been able to transpose this onto Chicago.

The permanence of hometowns, the deep-rooted belief that took place in his chest that home would be okay, that there’s still a Glenview and a Wilmette and a mom worried sick about him. It’s gone now. _Chicago_ is gone now. The golden mile is nothing but rubble and radiation, endless monochrome stretching from the Loop to Lincoln Park. The rest is varied devastation, from tangled concrete and twisted steel to blown out windows and tip-turned cars.

There is no Chicago. Nothing here from Glenview to Gary and no doubt well beyond. There is no way anyone they love survived this. Patrick considers throwing up as Pete hitches a sob into the cuff of his jacket beside him.

“There’s nothing here,” Joe says, practical and biting his own fury into his lip. He turns with purpose, presents what used to be Chicago with his back and strides for the van. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Chicago is dead.

There’s no reason for them to stay.

*

_I don’t know why I’m writing this any more. I guess I told myself we had a plan, a goal, a grand scheme that would all work out in the end. But, when you get right down to it, we’re four terrified guys in a broken down van and the world gave up waiting a year ago._

“Well,” says Andy, anxious, a real estate agent displaying house number twenty-three to bored young professionals and hoping to sell them with the promise of a farmhouse kitchen and increased square footage. “What do you think?”

Patrick shrugs and wonders if it makes him an asshole to state the obvious. Then, he promptly states the obvious. “It’s a house.”

Joe rolls his eyes, clearly convinced that Patrick’s intellectual processing skills took a hit over the last couple of months. “We _know_ , but it’s empty.”

“Pretty much every house we’ve seen for the past fourteen months has been empty,” says Pete, and Patrick is glad to have someone on side because he was beginning to wonder if _he_ was the idiot here. “Explain to me why this one warranted an open house session.”

“Look,” Andy beckons them closer, across the sun-bleached porch.

“I don’t want to be _that_ guy,” says Patrick. “But, like, my mom had a _lot_ to say about following bearded men into strange houses.”

He follows anyway, chasing Andy’s raised middle finger through a kitchen complete with checkered linoleum and Formica table, down and into a basement with Pete and Joe treading on his heels.

At the door, Andy pauses and it’s kind of like that scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, waiting for Willie Wonka to throw back the door. They wait. Andy grins, his teeth lost in the auburn tangle of his beard and shoves open the door. “Well, do you get it now?”

Patrick can’t draw breath to reply. Around them, above them, covering each and every inch of available wall space and ordered in marching columns, stand steel shelves. And on those shelves, in a rainbow of cacophonous color, rioting like planets across a galaxy of gluttony are cans, bottles, jars, boxes of every conceivable size and shape and flavor. Patrick’s not sure if it’s blood or a heavenly choir ringing in his ears.

Ecstatic, he wonders if eating Betty Crocker double fudge brown mix of questionable provenance directly from the box will kill him. He decides, tearing open the cardboard with feral hands, that this is an experiment he is absolutely willing to conduct, record and die for. A handful of chocolate, flour, sugar and baking powder clutched in his fist, he thinks, laughs, probably says out loud that this is exactly what that doctor felt like when he performed the first heart catheter on himself.

A hand joins his in the pack; Pete’s. A fistful of sugar-sweet powder stolen like spoils. They kiss, mouths sticky with cake mix, Patrick is convinced that nothing at all can pull his attention from this moment, the taste of chocolate thick on his tongue.

“—he was like a hoarder or a prepper or something,” Andy is saying, “the whole place is totally fucking tricked out. I think there’s even a hot water tank we can fire up with a propane canister.”

Patrick, it turns out, is entirely wrong, his head snapping around fast enough that his neck cramps painfully. “A hot water tank? We can _shower_?”

“We can shower,” Andy confirms, with the grin of a man who knows he’s done well. “Put down the culinaries, Barefoot Contessa, and come give me a hand figuring out how it works.”

They tangle together around the hot water tank, flicking switches, firing pilot lights, shoving and pushing and insisting the others are doing it all wrong. Then, miraculously, someone does it right and the damn thing fires into life. At this point, it’s just a matter of time until Patrick can feel the delicious sensation of warm water against his shoulders. He shovels cake mix into his mouth in reckless anticipation, watching the thermometer climb higher.

“Hey,” Pete whispers in his ear, spooning alternate mouthfuls of canned peaches and cream into his mouth. His greeting is wet, it sprays sugar sweetness against Patrick’s skin as he leans in close, a can in each hand slopping syrup and rich, pale cream over his hands, dripping decadence onto his wrists. “So, I don’t think you want to take a shower.”

“And on that count, you would be entirely _wrong_.”

“Let me finish,” with a wave of his cake mix, Patrick concedes that Pete can do just that, “I _think_ you should come with me and take a bath.”

Bombs, flu, violence: these are the things Patrick has survived. As he inhales a mouthful of powder, Patrick concedes that Duncan Hines Moist French Vanilla box mix is not the adversary he imagined would take him out of existence. He doubles over, hacking hard as Pete thumps his back, eyes streaming as he staggers to his feet and lets Pete tug, pull, drag him along the hallway and into the master bathroom.

There are bubbles in the tub, the strong scent of store brand, synthetic vanilla soap and undisturbed air. In the dust on the mirror, Pete has inscribed _I less than 3 U_. In lieu of candles or rose petals, he’s added a dick and balls, too, a cartoonish representation of a bare ass bent over in preparation. His method of seduction is not subtle.

“I feel like you’ve brought me here on false pretenses,” Patrick says; Pete is somehow already gloriously naked, muscle flowing like water under the endless gold and dark of his tattooed skin. “You don’t want to get clean at all.”

Pete cocks his head to the side, his good eye following Patrick as he shrugs out of his jacket and shirt. The soft swag of puppy fat around his waist is gone; he’s hard now, lean in a hungry way, the fuzz of copper-gold hair trailing away into his jeans, between hip bones that stand as angular as Pete’s. Against the vanity, Pete licks his lips and shakes his head.

“No. I want to be very, _very_ dirty. Take ’em off, Stump.”

Self-conscious, Patrick pauses, the button caught under his thumb and forefinger. “If you start signing You Can Leave Your Hat On, I’m going for a shower and I’m never coming back.”

“You ruin all of my surprises,” Pete sighs, pauses, grins filthy and fierce. “Go ahead, show me what you’re packing.”

Now, Patrick is counting backwards to the last time they did this. Was it a month ago? Longer? Hurried fumbling in the back of the van whilst Joe and Andy kept a polite distance for long enough to facilitate a hurried orgasm. Dark velvet shadows of late night — there are no streetlights now, no passing cars — it’s starlight and moonlight that slants in through the van. It’s not bright, not like now with the afternoon sunlight bursting bright through the window. Patrick touches his lips, embarrassed, feels rough-ragged scarring and avoids the way the mirror implores him to look.

“Whatever you’re thinking, stop,” Pete says, soft and tender.

He takes two steps forward, smells of warm skin and sweat and the unimaginable teenage boy stink of the back of the van. His cock is hard, dull red and thick. Patrick makes no move to stop him as he reaches for Patrick’s zipper, the button of his jeans, thumbing them open and letting them hit the linoleum. Patrick’s shorts follow, his own prick half-hard and pink, shaped to the fit of Pete’s palm as he touches reverently.

Finally, he reaches behind his head, tugs at the knot of fabric that covers the thick, ridged tissue where his eye used to be. Breath hauled deep, he pauses, looks at Patrick, touches his scarred-red mouth and whispers, “If you can love me like this, don’t ever think I can’t love you like that.”

The water is like nothing Patrick’s ever felt before, the culmination of all physical sensation caught in the way it wraps around him, the tickle of bubbles under his chin and the warm, slick slide of Pete’s skin between his thighs. They fumble, caught between washing one another’s hair and tugging one another’s cocks beneath the surface. Pete’s mouth tastes of sugar candy sweetness, his tongue velvet against the thick curve of Patrick’s lower lip.

“You’re so fucking sexy,” Patrick whispers into the damp, hot curve of Pete’s throat. Hands in Patrick’s hair, Pete hums, delighted, like he’ll never grow tired of hearing it. “Gorgeous. Beautiful. Mine.”

They create a small tidal wave, water sloshing over the lip of the tub to pool, slippery, on the dust-caked linoleum. It streaks, smudges messy and bleeds dark lines, veins spreading out from the pulsing, four-chambered heart of the bathtub. Patrick pushes Pete until he’s kneeling, ass out of the water and head hanging low. He kneels, knees inside of Pete’s, and tests the muscled weight of Pete’s ass against the cup of his palms. Against, his stomach, his cock curves thick and angry-dark, desperate for touch.

He leans down, kisses adoration against the base of Pete’s spine and claims ownership of the long, slow shudder that crawls the length of him. Against the porcelain, Pete’s fingers flexreleaseclench, curling into desperate fists, bones glowing ethereal through the copper of his skin. He’s tight, dark and inviting. Patrick rests his mouth against the small of Pete’s back and waits.

Impatient, Pete squirms. “Come on, babe.”

Patrick, teasing, squeezes his hips and releases, watches the way Pete’s skin pales, bloodless, a temporary reaction to each press of Patrick’s fingers. “Oh? Something you need?”

“You’re a dick,” Pete informs him; it tastes salted on the air between them, Patrick grins wickedly and feels the scar tissue in his lips stretch sore. “It’s been like, _forever_ , since we did this. I need – come _on_.”

“You could touch yourself. You know, if you wanted.”

This time, he doesn’t need a mirror to know his grin is shit-eating, his eyebrows raised as Pete lets out a wet, messy whimper and pushes his cock against the side of the tub. Patrick reaches between his legs, explores the weight of Pete’s balls, his perineum, flutters his thumb against the tight pinch of his hole. “Oh God, I fucking _hate_ you, Stump.”

“Oh, you _hate_ me?” Patrick pauses, teases the tip of his tongue where his thumb explored, tastes the salt-musk earthiness of him and glances up. “How much do you hate me?”

Pete’s teeth are clenched. “Could totally drown you.”

“Could. But won’t.”

“Try me.”

Patrick leans down instead, fits his face between the hallowed curve of Pete’s ass cheeks and molds his mouth to the sacred shape of him. Beyond and above him, Pete gasps, groans, arches back and pulls away in one electric-pulse motion. He starts slow, easy, flirts his tongue around the rim with the faintest, biting suggestion of teeth. His cock picks up the throb of his pulse, the same beat he feels through Pete’s body, the syncopated rhythm they’ve shared on stages, motel beds and caught in quiet corners. Patrick presses closer, eases Pete open with the swirling lap of his tongue.

“Oh fuck, fuck, _fuck_.” Pete, it seems has lost rationality, sensibility, reduced to humming syllables deep in his chest. “Your mouth, your mouth, _your mouth_.”

Patrick finds that way in, the way Pete loosens, widens, stretches for the aggressive invasion of Patrick’s tongue. He’s claiming territory, seeking ground and finds it, conquers it, hoards the steady thrust of Pete’s hips against the tub. The improbable, heated throb of his own cock is close to too much, he aches to be inside of Pete, to feel the way he gives around him, to push and thrust until the universe bottoms out beneath them.

The cry that tears from Pete is desperate as Patrick pulls away, his fingers sliding sticky against his hole, pushing inside, filling himself where Patrick has left him empty. “No, no, no, no. More. _More_.”

“More,” Patrick promises, staggering out of the tub and hauling Pete’s after him, dark, red dick veined thick and pretty and washed to mirror-shine with slippery suds. He snatches the lube from the pocket of Pete’s jeans, holds it aloft like a prize. “Come on.”

They fall to the sheets in a merry tangle, lips and limbs and aching cocks pressed tight. Between Pete’s thighs, Patrick grinds down, kisses him breathless then shares the last heated rush of oxygen from his own lungs. The slick-slippery head of Patrick’s cock finds the nipped-sharp heat of Pete’s hole. He pauses, braced above him and waits until Pete’s good eye flicks to Patrick’s.

“You’re good?” he asks softly.

Beneath him, Pete breathes very deeply and enunciates very clearly. “If you don’t fuck me _right now_ , I will take you out into the woods and straight up fucking _murder_ you.”

“Yeah. You’re good.”

He slides inside like coming home, like he can find absolution and completion in the way Pete opens around him, takes the thick, stiff length of his cock into the butter-soft yield of his body. Warmth spools low in his belly, tingling tightness, a drawn-tight knot behind the heavy heat of his balls and Patrick can smell-see-taste the very depth of the sensation. He sinks his fingernails into the sheets behind Pete’s head and watches the way the world spins gold, threads with veins of hot, coppered red and cool, dark sapphire.

Patrick thrusts; long, slow pulls of his prick against the smooth-walled heat of Pete’s body. They roll together, slick-wet sensation and velvet-plush motion, and there can be nothing beyond the way Patrick’s cock rocks deep into the pulse of Pete beneath him, the way Pete’s blood-heavy cock presses taut between their stomachs. The world is washed away, replaced with nothing but the two of them, the smell of knock-off body wash and the way Pete moans his name like benedicton.

His teeth find the sinew of Pete’s shoulder, score his dental records in ruby against the jet-dark tangle of thorns around Pete’s neck. Lower, he licks heat and desperation into the nut-brown pebble of Pete’s nipple, luxuriates in the tightness as Pete pulls taut around him. Head thrown back and neck a long, elegant line of exposed muscle and skin, Patrick is sure no man can be more beautiful.

Between them, he takes Pete’s rigid dick in his hand and begins to stroke.

Pete’s heels scrabble reckless in the small of Patrick’s back, pushing, urging, demanding more, deeper, faster. So, Patrick gives. He fucks him, bites him, kisses him, gorges greedy on the glorious depth of Pete’s cries, the operatic clarity of each soaring high note he can coax from him. His hand is slippery with bitter-salt pre-come, his eyes stinging sore with sweat.

But Patrick is still barely twenty and it’s been a while since the last time he felt Pete like this and so, he comes. It’s too soon, too sudden, sensation stealing the air from the room and leaving him choking on empty lungs. He presses his mouth to the throb of Pete’s pulse and imagines it matches the throb of his cock as he spills endless heat and wanton dissipation deep, hard, fast.

Beneath him, Pete shows his teeth, smiles wide and brilliant and strokes a hand through Patrick’s sweaty hair. “Well,” he says fondly, pushing errant strands back from his eyes and Patrick would apologize, but Pete doesn’t sound pissed. “Eager boy.”

“It’s what you do to me,” Patrick whispers, panting. His spine is numb, his cock endless sensation, the nerve rerouting to fire shockwaves through the base of his skull that skitter tingles into the roots of his teeth as he shifts.

“How about you do something to me?” Pete laughs, self-satisfied in that way he always is when he gets Patrick off. His gaze bounces between Patrick’s mouth and the rude, red length of his own stiff prick, the question unspoken.

Patrick pauses, touches the rawness of his badly healed scar. The thing is, Pete likes to watch him do this, and Patrick’s always given him a show. He knows he has the mouth for it, he’s heard whispers about the thick, pink plush of his lower lip from guys in bars since they started playing dive bars. But that was before. His hesitation is borne from vanity and he knows Pete won’t understand, panics bright and hot in the center of his chest as he rears back on his knees and pulls his cock free too fast.

“Don’t look,” he mutters, sliding down.

“Hey,” Pete says, hand cupped under Patrick’s chin. His heart is out of time, throbbing wet and pulsing against his ribs as he looks anywhere but at Pete. “Look at me.” Reluctantly, Patrick does, sucking as much of his horror-mask bottom lip into his mouth as he can. “Stop that. Stop thinking you’re less than what you were.”

“Hmm,” says Patrick, his mouth between Pete’s cheeks once more as he laps the sticky-wet mess from his fucked out hole.

“Come on, asshole,” Pete groans, giggles when he gets how inappropriate his choice of words actually is, “quit avoiding the subject,” Patrick pushes his tongue deeper, tastes the thick, salted bitter of his own come against the male-dark musk of Pete’s skin, “you’re — you don’t fight fair,” Patrick pushes his fingers through the tangled dark of Pete’s pubic hair, seizes the swollen hardness of his prick and begins to stroke, eyes twinkling merriment across the glorious litheness of Pete’s stomach, “If I blow in your face, this is all — ah! — all on you. _Fuck!_ ”

Hands, mouth, fingers, Patrick works in perfect syncopation. He pulls his tongue over skin burnt-bright with nerves, drags his hand across satin skin and, palm curled under his chin, pushes his fingertips to the hot, tight hum of Pete’s prostate.

Pete comes. Not in Patrick’s eyes, but through his hair, dripping heat and lustered wetness along his own stomach, staining sin across the bartskull above his groin. Patrick strokes him until the tremors stop then rests his head against Pete’s thigh, punctuates the moment with a loud, smacking kiss to the crease of Pete’s groin.

“Come here,” he murmurs, grinning golden as Patrick crawls to meet him, as he kisses him deep and slow. He pulls back with a grimace. “Dude, you taste of ass.”

Patrick raises his eyebrows and counters. “Seriously? You know what else tastes of ass? Your ass.”

They laugh and they tangle together, puppies in a basket. For the first time in a long time, Patrick feels safe. He’s warm and content and his belly is full of cake mix, bulging out softly. He rubs the round of Pete’s stomach and feels the way his heart beats under his ribs.

“We should’ve eaten vegetables,” Patrick observes. “Vitamins. Minerals. The possibility of _not_ getting scurvy.”

“I made my choice,” Pete counters, defiant but lazy. “Besides, most things are plants if you trace them back far enough. Sugar cane, cocoa beans, wheat…”

“You’re a genius.”

“I know, right?”

They fall silent, companionable and content.

“This might be nice,” Patrick says. Pete is staring at the ceiling. He flicks him a glance that’s lazy, loaded with love. “You know, this? A place to stay, a bed. I could get used to this.”

“It won’t last,” Pete opines, shaking his head. “Someone will come, someone with more guns, more knives, someone who wants it more. Then what?”

“There has to be other people,” Patrick shrugs. “Settlements, towns, they didn’t all just — disappear. We could find a place, somewhere like this but safer.”

“I love you,” Pete says, and Patrick can’t decide if he’s changing the subject. He goes with it anyway, too tired to debate.

“Yeah, love you too.”

He falls asleep, dappled with afternoon sunlight and for once, he isn’t afraid.

*

“I wish we could stay,” Joe leans against the porch railing and watches the dogs chasing butterflies and dust clouds across the dirt. They raided the closets in the house and nothing fits; whoever lived here was tall, broad, the jeans Patrick’s stolen are turned up four inches and hang off his hip bones but they’re clean. In honesty, Patrick’s never had a particularly high threshold for acceptable fashion choices. “God, imagine being able to shower _every day_.”

“Dude,”’Patrick says, nudging shoulders, “if you could shower every day, we wouldn’t need to drive with the windows down.”

“I have a proposition,” Andy declares, moving half a crate of canned vegetables with Pete.

They’re loading the van, piling food and kit as high as they can stack it as the summer sun beats down on them like it has a grudge. Patrick pauses, swipes sweat from his eyes with his wristband and considers Andy carefully. Every time his band mates have a proposition, it ends badly.

“Remember what I said about strange men with beards?” Patrick says. “If you’ve got puppies, I’m not interested.”

“Very funny,” Andy rolls his eyes like Patrick isn’t funny. This is ridiculous. Patrick is hilarious. “Seriously, shit heads, listen.” They listen, Pete smelling of sweat and unfamiliar laundry soap, his hand tucked down into Patrick’s back pocket. “So, I had this friend back in college, belonged to a couple of anarchist groups, played a few straight-edge bands with me. He used to talk about going off grid, about how the world was due to go to shit any day and he wanted to be ready.”

“Are we gonna be hippies?” Pete asks. “I mean, you’ve got that whole Charles Manson look going on right now.”

“Can we knock it off about the fucking beard? Look, he bought a bunch of land in Wisconsin, dropped out of college and started developing the whole thing. Last I heard, it was going pretty well for him. I — I still have his address.”

They pause. A collective breath held between them as the sun beats down and the dogs stir up dust. In the time since it happened, since the world as they know it burnt up and Chicago burnt down, Patrick hasn’t allowed himself to think of the concept of home. It’s alien to him now, foreign, the thought of spending consecutive nights in the same place, the shape of familiarity winding around him.

He’s homesick but not for Glenview, not any more. Now, he’s homesick for security, to live a life where they don’t drift like summer storms. The possibility of spending winter someplace warm.

“I think we should go,” he blurts out into the silence. Andy’s smile curls up, an equal and opposite reaction to the way Pete’s brows push down, his scowl fierce black as his nails sink into Patrick’s ass through the denim. “What have we got to lose?”

“I’m in,” Joe agrees. “Fuck, if last night taught me anything, it’s how much I used to take mattresses for granted. Just laying there, all delicious and spring-filled and slutty. God, I’d trade my left nut for a sleepeezee.”

Patrick’s never thought of mattresses as slutty, but his agreement is heartfelt and sincere. “Testify!”

“Nuhuh,” Joe shakes his head, bad-tempered. “You’re officially _not allowed_ to spend time on things that creak or groan with _him,_ ” and he jerks his thumb at Pete, “I thought the goddamn world was ending with the two of you going at it.”

“The world _did_ end, dipshit. And if I want to fuck my boyfriend—”

“I can’t promise high-end bedding ranges,” Andy interjects with a shudder, like he can’t imagine any possible positive outcome to letting Patrick finish his sentence, “but, like, last time I saw it the compound was looking pretty tight. If we take off now, we can probably make it out there before nightfall, it’s just—”

“No.”

The air is sucked from their bonhomie, the party falling flat as Pete shoves his hands down into the pockets of his jeans and sends a pebble skimming across the dirt. Hemmy chases it, oblivious to the tension pulled taut between them, the sticky, hot weight of it that engulfs them as they pause.

“What do you mean?” Patrick says. Pete has that self-indulgent, pariah-infused, smouldering James Dean thing going on right now, where he stares into the middle distance like he can see the future. This is unfortunate because it’s both intensely irritating and maddeningly sexy, the knot of fabric around his eye detracting not one bit from the whole intense anti hero thing he has going on. “Come on, don’t be a dick.”

“It’s not safe,” Pete says, nothing more.

Patrick’s got that electric pulse tingle in his veins. It’s the scattered starlight of his pulse in the seconds before a show, the boards dusty and carved up with industrial tape securing cables and picks and the mic stand that _always_ turns to the left. A pungent stench of adrenaline and need and rabbit-pulsed _fear_. Foot halfway off the edge of a tall building. Crossing the street just a beat too late to avoid the airhorn of the encroaching semi truck.

He clears his throat and waits for the impact. “Is _this_ safe? Dude, get real, we haven’t been safe since some asshole got trigger happy with the nuclear codes!”

“People are _dangerous_ ,” Pete has an edge to his voice, sharp, the perilous line between holding his temper and letting it go, “people we don’t know in large numbers when we have a van full of fucking _food_ are like, _super_ fucking dangerous.”

“You’re scared,” Patrick accuses him, visions of municipality slipping through his fingers like the contents of an hourglass. “You’re — you’re fucking _scared_ and you’re gonna ruin this for the rest of us.”

“Fuck you,” Pete snaps as he walks away, middle finger raised.

They stand in silence, Joe, Andy and Patrick until Patrick breaks it with a sigh. “I’ll go talk to him.”

He finds him by an outbuilding, tossing rocks against the siding until it rattles like loose teeth. The noise makes him easy to find, though Patrick swears he’d be drawn by the pulse of his fury even if he were deaf. Pete doesn’t look at him. “Go away.”

“I kind of want to,” Patrick points out, tracing the toe of his sneaker through the dirt. “But you need to come with. Listen,” Pete doesn’t reply, but he does stop hurling broken bricks at broken windows for long enough for Patrick to speak, “I know you’re scared. I am, too. But I’m even _more_ scared of another winter in that van, of another gang, of running out of food again and not finding any more. I’m terrified we’re going to die, or one of us is, or two of us. And then what? Where do I go if it’s you? _You’re_ my home now, just — just let me try to find a place we can both be safe.”

“And if it’s not safe?” Pete asks. “If they’re territorial or insane or — or if they’re _dead_ already? Then what?”

“No one put you in charge.”

“ _No one said that I wasn’t_!” Pete screams from the depths of his soul, shakes the seismic vibrations of it out through his fingertips and down into the dirt at his toes. “I’ve kept us safe! I know you guys think I’m the fucking comic relief but I’ve _kept us safe_! We’re alive and we’re here and nobody else _is_. I’m not — I _can’t_ let us walk into something we don’t understand.”

He won’t admit it, and Patrick won’t ask, but tears are bright on his lashes as he turns away and heaves a breath. Predicting that it’s safe to do so, Patrick steps closer. He winds his arms around the too-small stretch of Pete’s waist and maps the curve between his ribs with the pad of his thumbs. He kisses adoration into the olive-dark skin at the nape of Pete’s neck and smells synthetic vanilla and last night’s sweat. Pete exhales, the breath he’s been holding for months, and slumps back into Patrick’s arms.

“I don’t have the answers,” he murmurs, “but we can find out together.”

“And if they kill us, steal our food and harvest our organs?” Pete asks bitterly.

Patrick laughs into the collar of his shirt. “Then I give you full and frank permission to make your last words ‘I fucking told you so’.”

*

Andy is wrong and they don’t make it before nightfall. The sky is that deep-velvet shade of blue, black, purple and scattered with crushed diamond shards of too-many stars. Patrick only believes that there are too many because he knows the reason they’re so bright; no power, no artificial light, nothing but endless darkness. It’s beautiful in a way that reminds him of his own insignificance and mortality.

This is awfully deep for a drive in Wisconsin.

But of course, the last time they rolled past the sign that declares ‘Wisconsin welcomes you’ they were rolling on dreams. The recording studio that looked more like a crack den and the time he and Pete had the same idea involving cheap air freshener and the sweat-thick stench of their own armpits. The last time Patrick saw the shape of the cheese state carved out of wood and framed by posts, he was a rock star in training. Now, he’s not sure what he is beyond terrified.

Up front, Andy is squinting between the windshield and the map balanced on his knees. “We’re close, guys.”

On the seat next to him, Pete takes his hand. It’s slick with sweat, his knee bouncing compulsively and his lower lip caught between his teeth. Andy turns down a darkened side road, barely more than a dirt track and Patrick feels the panic attack kick in.

From the passenger seat, Joe says, “Do you think there’ll be, like, _girls_? Like, I don’t mean to be _that_ guy but I haven’t had a blowjob in a year and a half. That’s nearly ten percent of my existence so far.”

“You’re horrible,” Andy informs him crisply. Lila whines like she agrees.

“No way, this is fucking serious! This van is a sausage-fest, I mean, there’s gotta be girls, right? I miss girls. They’re a reason not to fart in an enclosed space, the meaning behind washing feet thoroughly, they’re basically what separates us from animals.”

“You honestly think _women_ are responsible for your personal hygiene?” Andy begins, an equal rights rant rending the air. “Honestly, I think—”

No one finds out what Andy thinks as the van floods with light and he slams to a halt.

Patrick has been scared before. Both in the life when humanity still existed and in the life that’s come after it. He’s felt fear that aches down into his bone marrow and made his lungs seize, the plunge of ice-cold water along his spine.

But nothing prepares him for the wide-eyed terror of flashlights at the window — ten, twelve, twenty, too many to count — of the van door scraping open and a voice ricocheting against the walls.

“Stay where you are and show your hands.”

There’s a very real possibility that Patrick dislocates his shoulder in his effort to get both hands above his head immediately. Something cold and hard nudges the back of his skull, some dim and distant part of his psyche helpfully supplying the word ‘gun’.

The world explodes into light and noise then contracts, a dying star, into endless blackness as Patrick stiffens, slumps and considers passing out. Andy is trying to explain the connection, repeating names like religious mantras, counting them off on the rosary of desperation.

“Shut up and get out of the van,” says the voice, disembodied beyond the blinding light of mega-watt bulbs.

They stagger from the van and follow, guns in their backs, through the twist-and-turn labyrinth of endless woodland. At least, Patrick supposes, if they die, they’ll go out together.

He hopes they kill him first so he doesn’t have to watch Pete die. He hopes it’s quick. He hopes it doesn’t hurt.

“I love you,” Pete whispers, calm in the chaos.

Patrick looks at him, attempts to convey the very depth of what he means, the possibility that this could be the last time he shapes his lips to the words. “Fuck. I — I love you too.”

They’re shoved, rushed, pushed into a clearing. Patrick thinks he sees barbed wire, more guns, it’s impossible to be sure around a blur of panicked fear curling hot pokers through his chest. Into a building, into a room, they’re shoved to their knees and forced to stay still and silent. Patrick counts his breaths, feels the way each one fills the stuttering soreness of his lungs and waits.

There’s a voice at the door, raised, irritated, someone pushing inside and shouting out orders. This is it. Patrick waits to see the edge of the universe in a gunshot.

“What the hell are you doing? We don’t _have_ a hierarchy, that’s sort of the point. And _why_ are you waving guns at people? Do _they_ have guns? Honestly, I — _Andy_?” Whoever he is pauses, painted shocked, Patrick wonders if anyone ever pissed themselves in relief or if he’s about to start a new trend. “What the _fuck_ are you doing on the floor!”

*

_I run out of things all the time. It used to matter, when it was things like food, like patience and tolerance and **hope**. It seems to matter a little less when it’s stuff like pencils and notebook paper. This is the last page of the last book that anyone picked up on a run through the towns nearby. I could ask Andy to grab me a new one — it’s not like anyone broke down the doors at Staples when the world ended — but this seems like a good place to leave it._

_Today, we met Avigail Trohman. She’s **beautiful** in ways I can’t even begin to describe. I’m going to write her a lullaby, something just for her. It’s funny, the things you gift to a new baby when you can’t take a run to Target and pick up a onesie in regulation pink or blue. _

_I guess this is where I write something profound but I’ve never been much of a lyricist. All I can say is this: the world hasn’t ended, it’s changed. We’re the same people but made a little better for the things we lost and the way we had to adapt to move on. We won’t forget, we’re better than that, we’re ink half-dried; smudged but legible. We make it count._

_The pages have run out but we haven’t. We’re Fall Out Boy, we have a gay signal and we **survived**. _

Belonging and boredom do not share a common phrase. This truth Patrick holds to be self-evident as he stretches stiff against sheets that smell of home, blinking up at the familiar lines of Pete’s ass, thighs, the dropped hang of his softening cock and, fingers wrapped into the curls at the nape of Pete’s neck, comes with desperate, driving force into the willing heat of Pete’s mouth.

He gasps, choking, mouth stained salt and bitter with the taste of Pete’s two-minutes-ago orgasm. Against his hip, Pete murmurs morning prayer into the sweat-damp soft of Patrick’s skin. “I love you.”

When Patrick can breathe again, he swears he’ll reply. For now, he grips his treasured gold grasp into the stretch of Pete’s shoulder and waits for the touch of his mouth. Pete moves off him, swinging his leg back over Patrick’s chest and walking back to the head of the bed on his knees. They exchange secrets against the pillow, kissing adoration into one another’s mouths and Patrick wonders, absent, when this won’t feel like the first time.

Pete’s scar is settled now, the angry-red wound of it giving way to silvered-pink scar tissue. Patrick’s mouth is much the same, long-term war wounds that they’ll carry for a lifetime. He finds he cares less and less as they put weeks, months, years between them and the terrified instances of blinding pain.

Once upon a Patrick.

In the still, rose-gold light of early morning, Midwest, somewhere that isn’t the ruins of Chicago, Patrick falls in love. He does it every morning, the touch of Pete’s mouth to his, the wrap of hands and skin and questing need.

When he says it, Pete pushes his mouth to Patrick’s Adam’s apple, absorbing each word like Morse code. “I love you, too.”

“So, mutual morning dick-sucking aside,” Pete begins, an anxious twitch of movement under the sheets, “What do you want to do today?”

“Today, we’ll go crazy,” Patrick intones, serious and solemn. “Today we’ll climb the Sears tower and take photos from the viewing platform, today we’ll take a tour of Wrigley Field and you’ll tell me again how we’re going to play there one day, today we’ll ride out to Lake Michigan and skim stones and you’ll laugh at how crappy I am at it.” Pete hums against his throat, presses tickle-threatening fingertips between the arched shape of his ribs. Patrick concedes. “Or, you know, we could hang out with Andy and Joe, do our chores and appreciate that whole _being alive_ thing.”

“Patrick Stump, you have the best ideas.” Patrick doesn’t, but he suspects now isn’t the time to point it out. “God, I can’t _wait_ to see Avigail again.”

“Can you believe Joe’s a dad?” He doesn’t say it, but he means _can you believe we’ll never get that_.

Of course, Pete knows anyway. Maddening, impetuous, impulsive Pete Wentz, improbably sensitive in the ways that matter most. He takes Patrick’s hand and whispers, “Hey, don’t think it. We have like, three dozen kids now,” he means every bundle of ill-fitting clothes and bruised knees that lives on the compound, “You play with them out there, you watch them play with Hemmy like he’s Nana—”

Against Pete’s curls, Patrick smiles, “And you’re their Peter Pan.”

“Yeah,” Pete says, softened at the corners, toothsome and brilliant, “and you’re my Lost Boy and here we are in Neverland.”

Patrick hopes this means they’ll never grow up, that they’ll never die. It’s a funny sort of fairytale, found amongst the ash and ruin of a world that’s changed beyond all comprehension. Sometimes, Patrick feels like a phoenix, burnt up only to rise from the ashes transformed.

He kisses Pete on the mouth once, twice, three times and makes a wish, brings Pete’s hand to his mouth and kisses the ink hidden between his fingers. 2 * R.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, as Pete groans and stretches and rolls from the mattress (their bed isn’t more than a mattress dropped on pallets but it’s warm and it’s safe and it’s _theirs_ , tucked as it is in the tiny corrugated cabin just down from the main hall — second hut to the right, Pete insisted). Tugging on his jeans and muttering something to Hemmy about taking a piss, Pete cocks his head to show he’s listening. “Maybe I could start teaching some of the kids to play guitar. I mean, if no one does then music’s going to die out, right?”

His eyes slide to the battered acoustic in the corner of the room, cherry-red warmth glowing sweet from the body of it. Andy found it, out on a supply mission. Pete’s clearly still pissed it wasn’t him but Patrick’s happy to keep him close to home, his eye makes him more liability than he likes to admit.

“Will you teach them Grand Theft Autumn?” Pete teases, shrugging into his shirt. Patrick lives with an asshole and bites his disapproval into the muscle-hard curve of Pete’s hip to demonstrate this. “Hey! Fucker!”

Patrick hauls him back, kisses him breathless and breathes into the curve of his grin, “I’ll teach them every word I wrote for you and I’ll write you a thousand more,” before Pete can gag at the ridiculous notion of it, Patrick scruffs his knuckles against Pete’s jaw, “but first, I’ll probably teach them Bowie.”

Right now, there are chickens to feed and gardens to tend, there are meals to cook and babies to visit and a lullabye to write just for Avigail. Patrick will fill his day with living, with watching the way the world reshapes around them, the ugly scars closing until very little of the wound is self-evident. Tonight, in the main hall under solar-powered lights, Patrick will play his guitar and sing the songs they recorded in a studio an hour away when the world was a different place.

Tonight, he’ll collapse into his bed next to the man who’ll never officially be his husband in this world without rules and regulatory pieces of paper, but might as well be in all of the ways that matter. They have no money, no fame, no possessions at all beyond the walls of their two-room cabin.

But Patrick? He has everything he needs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you haven't already, please go and give all of the love to [Das_verlorene_Kind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Das_verlorene_Kind/pseuds/Das_verlorene_Kind) and her incredible artwork.
> 
> Comments and kudos are amazing and I'd love to hear what you think! 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers for Peterick, feminism and funny pictures of cats.


End file.
